Review: Cold Steel, by Kate Elliott

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon Nov 4 20:49:13 PST 2019


Cold Steel
by Kate Elliott

Series:    Spiritwalker #3
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: June 2013
ISBN:      0-316-21515-5
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     597

Cold Steel is the third book in the closely-linked Spiritwalker
trilogy. This is one long, sprawling story rather than separable books.
If you want to read it, start with Cold Magic, and beware of spoilers
for Cold Fire in even cursory descriptions of Cold Steel.

Cold Steel opens with Cat in the hot Caribbean, where most of Cold Fire
was set, but does not stay there. This is a proper end to the trilogy
and wraps up all the loose ends: the peril Andevai was left in after
the semi-cliffhanger ending of Cold Fire, the conflict over governance
in Europe, the power of the cold mage Houses, the politics of the
radicals, the conflict between cold and fire magic, Bee's entanglements
in the Caribbean, Camjiata's war of conquest, and of course the Wild
Hunt. There's a lot of plot to finish.

Somewhat unfortunately, what Cold Steel also contains in large quantity
is Andevai being an idiot, Cat and Andevai failing to communicate for
new (but dumb) reasons, and one of the characters developing into a
full-blown arch-villain.

This is a series with a fascinating premise (a very complex alternate
history with dragons, magic, humanoid dinosaurs, and a very odd sort of
elven court) that I wanted to be a political drama but that the author
wrote primarily as a romance. This is not entirely the author's fault;
it's a serviceable romance if you enjoy two vastly stubborn people
butting heads, falling in love, discovering that being in love doesn't
prevent them from butting heads, and finally reaching some hard-fought
compromises. But I thought the romance was the least interesting (and
least original) thing that was happening in this series and wanted to
get it over with so that the series could move on to the more
interesting bits, and that opinion was not shared by the author.

The part that caught my attention, as noted in my review of Cold Fire,
is the political cause of radicalism and egalitarianism. The history
varies wildly from ours, but the politics are clearly late French
Revolution writ large (without the church, which is interesting):
princes and cold mages colluding to maintain an aristocratic, almost
feudal order, resented by laborers and political radicals who are
trying to form new governments of equality and to undermine historical
privilege and systems of indenture. Into that mix, Elliott drops
Camjiata, a brilliantly ambiguous figure who is this world's Napoleon.
He uses the radicals, speaks on their terms, and claims to fight for
equality, but he personally wants to conquer Europe and bring back the
glories of the Roman Empire. He's a strategic genius, one of the
smartest people in the book (that's a difficult characterization to
write well and Elliott does a good job), but his agenda isn't that of
the protagonists or, really, anyone else. Elliott gives the impression
of Camjiata as something that happens to Europe more than a force that
comes out of the politics everyone else cares about, which I found
intriguing throughout the series.

Unfortunately, despite radicalism's central role in the plot and
despite Cat's sister Bee finding an unexpected but believable place for
herself as a leader, the politics don't go anywhere satisfying. There
is little resolution for Europe here, just some personal impact for
Andevai and Cat and a parallel mythical plot line with the Wild Hunt
that I thought was a bit too obvious (although the resolution of it is
satisfying). A series that wrestled with the political complexities of
defining radicalism as a constructive form of government instead of an
opposition resistance force (the shoal that, to simplify greatly, the
real French Revolution ran aground on) would have been messy and
challenging to write, but that was the book I wanted to read. Cold
Steel alas turns somewhat away from that to personalize the problems
and solve them primarily in the realms of magic and romance.

The other difficulty with this final book is that it's structurally a
mess. There are too many loose ends to weave together, which results in
some odd pacing and story structure. The book starts as a continuation
of Cold Fire, involving Caribbean politics and magic, and builds up to
a climax with the fairy world a third of the way into the book. Then
comes a quiet interlude with Cat and Andevai that stumbles into a
pacing gap where Cat is unhappy but not communicating, Andevai is
ignoring her, no forward progress is made on the major plots of the
novel, and there is a lot of frustrating talking. Pacing for the rest
of the book comes in fits and starts, building up to a weirdly
unsatisfying war and turning the broader politics of the series into a
too-simplistic arc of personal animus, mustache-twirling evil, and
magical penis-measuring. Even the ending, although eventually
satisfying, provides another excuse for Cat to not talk to people about
things that are important.

I'm probably making this sound worse than it is. I am glad I read the
whole series. It's hugely ambitious and succeeds in being something
different than the typical fantasy trilogy. The world background is one
of the most creative I've seen, and if I found the politics
unsatisfying in the end, that's only because Elliott attempted
something far more ambitious and radical than most fantasy will go
near. I think the first book was the strongest and the series sputtered
to a conclusion, but it is a proper and satisfying conclusion and both
Cat and Andevai, by the end of the series, are characters I enjoy
spending time with.

Cold Steel by itself is a bit of a mess, but I still recommend the
series as a whole, as long as you're in the mood for something long and
complicated and not completely successful.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-11-04

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-21515-5.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


More information about the book-reviews mailing list